FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention pertains to an energy collector comprising a housing, which is designed to have at its upper side a covering made of a material that is transparent to visible and thermal radiation, and in whose interior there is disposed at least one heat collector, which is carried by a pipe through which a heat-transport medium can flow, and having a reflector of concave design which is arranged underneath each heat collector and whose width is significantly greater than the width of the heat collector assigned to respective reflector. As a result, the incident visible and/or thermal radiation either passes to the front side of the at least one heat collector or is reflected onto its rear side by means of the associated reflector.
An energy collector of that type is disclosed in European patent disclosure EU A1 614 058. However, the prior art energy collector is used solely to feed thermal energy to the heat collectors, the energy being carried away by means of the heat-transport medium flowing through the pipes and fed to a user, in that, for example, it is used in low-temperature heating or it serves to produce hot water for useful purposes.
Furthermore, light energy may be converted into electrical energy by means of photovoltaic elements. However, since the efficiency of photovoltaic elements decreases sharply at temperatures above 30.degree. C., it has hitherto not been possible to apply focused visible radiation to photovoltaic elements. Rather, for this reason it is possible to apply only unfocused visible radiation to photovoltaic elements.
In order to obtain electrical energy by means of photovoltaic elements, it is thus necessary to connect a very large number of photovoltaic elements in series. However, in this case there is also the difficulty that the production of photovoltaic elements is very expensive. All of these facts taken together have hitherto rendered obtaining electrical energy from light energy so costly as to classify the prior art technology entirely uneconomic.